The sail has been rough ever since it happened—this saga of the waking world that rarely ends. I watched it unfold vividly, impacting the deepest parts of me. Now, I am sitting on a rock that feels immortal, standing firm against the waves and the rain. I hear the chirping of birds flying from tree to tree. They enjoy every single breath. The question is, why do they seem so much happier? Holding a booklet of long letters, the message is clear: "I warn you, son, it all goes in a circle." My heart skips a beat as I read the words.
The sun sets in the far west, casting a long, golden shadow behind me. The mountain peaks grow cloudier as fog rises from them. That shadow behind me—the only part of me left—knows more than anyone. Dusk creeps in, slowly taking over. I lift my feet and start walking back down the lonely road. These letters hold half of my soul. What do they contain? I wish I had read them all, but every word was written by a bleeding finger in blood. The letters, written in black ink, have dots of blood all over them. The smell from the letters hits my nostrils excruciatingly. I wish I wouldn't read all in it, or maybe I should.
The road is wider these days, cracked and fractured. Some cracks are filled with dirty water, others with clean. Thorns sprout sharp and aggressive from the roadside. Every move feels heavy; the past feels heavier. I walk slowly to evade the cracks and the thorns. I cannot avoid them all, but I can accept this one fate.
Night finds me before I find the end of this road. The letters are tucked now against my chest, close to where the heart insists on beating despite everything it carries. I have stopped trying to read them in the failing light. Some things are not meant to be understood in the dark; they only ask to be carried. The wind picks up, and with it comes that same voice, faint and circling, repeating what it always repeats—that it all goes in a circle. I used to fight that thought. Now I only nod at it, the way you nod at an old man who has said the same thing every evening for years and has, somehow, always been right.
Somewhere behind me, the rock I sat on is still standing against water it did not choose to face. I think of it often on nights like this. It does not ask why the waves come. It simply remains, letting the water do what water does, letting the years carve into it whatever they intend to carve. Maybe that is the only kind of courage left for men like me—not the courage to stop the tide, but the courage to still be standing when it finally recedes.
The birds have gone quiet now; even they do not sing into the dark. Only my footsteps answer the silence, uneven against the cracked earth, half-avoiding the thorns, half-accepting them. I do not know yet where this road ends, or if it ends at all, or if—as the letter warned—it simply bends back to where I began, dressed differently, calling itself by a new name. But I keep walking. The blood-dotted pages grow heavier with each step, and still I carry them, because some part of me believes that whatever they contain, I was always meant to read them in full, even if it takes the rest of this long, cracked road to do it.